A difference in emphasis: raising the floor versus raising the ceiling

Matt Clifford has written about how building a world-changing technology company has never been easier than it is today. But for all of the technical, commercial, and industry-specific knowledge that founders can readily access, psychological knowledge still lags behind. (In fac... See more

Be bold

I believe that it’s easier to do a hard startup than an easy startup. People want to be part of something exciting and feel that their work matters.

If you are making progress on an important problem, you will have a constant tailwind of people wanting to help you. Let yourself grow more ambitious, and don’t be afraid to work on what you rea... See more

‘Move fast and break things’, ‘Test and learn’, ‘Dynamic optimization’, ‘Fail fast’, we’ve all embraced the thinking of the modern age and this always-on and agile approach. Clearly moving fast is good, clearly bureaucracy is bad, but sometimes I’m not sure we think. Often corporate strategy for large firms seems to be missing. There isn’t a bold v

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I think there are things in life that you want to telescope and compress and accelerate and streamline and make more efficient. And there are things where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent, in the pain endured, in the effort you have to invest. And I don’t think we’re going to differentiate between those things. Because ... See more

It’s easy enough to draw the Great Safety Net 2.0 on the back of a napkin. But once the overall concept becomes clear, the challenge isn’t to build the entire macro mechanism in just one round. Rather it is to invent solutions to an infinity of simple problems in fields as diverse as lifelong training, occupational licensing, housing, transportatio

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What haven’t I experienced firsthand that leaves me naive to how something works? As Jeff Immelt said, “Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it.”